Spectacular Northern Lights create surreal sights in Donegal

A solar explosion crashed into Earth's magnetic field and created the Northern Lights.Adam Rory Porter photography

A solar explosion crashed into Earth's magnetic field in October 2013 and created the Northern Lights across parts of Canada, the United States, and Ireland. One Donegal photographer took full advantage and captured these other-worldly images.

The Donegal man, Adam Rory Porter, captured the photographs below in Urris, Clonmany, Inishowen, County Donegal. Porter said that there may be even bigger displays of the Northern Lights, the aurora borealis, over the coming days.

In Maine, on Fuller Road in Easton, photographer Paul Cyr caught a spectacular image of a young Amish boy on his way to work at 4.30am, silhouetted by the lights.

Cyr said, “The Amish people get up very early to start work and the young man had never seen the Northern Lights before.

“He was blown away by its natural beauty. We stood and shared the moment for a while.”

These solar flares create auroras when radiation from the sun reaches Earth and interacts with charged protons in our atmosphere. The lights are stronger at the magnetic poles and weaken as they move south.

NASA scientists predicted that the current period of solar activity would reach a new peak in December. Todd Hoeksema, the Director of the Wilcox Solar Observatory at Stanford University, said that by December there would be what is termed a ‘solar flip.’